Mail ordering has become a widely used way of buying goods. More and more companies offer virtual department stores, in which the customers can electronically put goods in a shopping cart that later will be transferred by the respective company into an dispatch order, so that in a warehouse a shipment comprising the items ordered (and sometimes additional items such as samples, vouchers, invoices, etc.) can be assembled based on the respective dispatch order.
While assembling a shipment in a warehouse is nowadays often done more or less fully automated, packaging the items to be shipped is still a challenge, in particular when a shipment comprises several items of different sizes and in different quantity. Often, the items to be packaged are provided automatically to a person packaging the items manually. Depending on the size and number of the items, the person selects a suitable box size. Generally the box is a cardboard box that upon packaging is assembled from a corresponding cardboard blank.
To automate the packaging process even in cases where the items vary in size and number, in WO 2014/118594 A1 a system has been proposed that allows creating a custom sized box from a roll or a stack of cardboard by cutting out a custom sized blank, from which then a suitable box is folded automatically. While this system works perfectly well for numerous applications, there is room for improvement with respect to the amount of material needed for producing a box.